Elasticsearch: Easy, Complete and Robust – Just like Our Product

With unbelievable excitement we just announced Elasticsearch secured $10M in Series A venture funding from Benchmark Capital, led by Peter Fenton. Other investors in the round include my SpringSource co-founder Rod Johnson and Data Collective. Being able to work with Peter Fenton and Rod Johnson again after SpringSource is nothing short of a privilege. Both are established open source visionaries and have already brought a lot of value to the company in terms of insights, network and general advice over the last few weeks.

Three reasons stand out why Benchmark, Rod, and Data Collective believe in Elasticsearch: the product and the company:

Adoption: 1.6 Million Downloads and Counting
This is one of the areas in which Elasticsearch is special as an open source project. The project is currently being downloaded at a run rate of approximately 200,000 downloads per month, making it one of the most rapidly adopted solutions in big data and is used in mission critical applications by thousands of companies worldwide.

The Solution: Searching and Analyzing Big Data in Real Time
Shay specifically designed Elasticsearch from the ground up to be a runtime environment that allows people to analyze and act on massive volumes of data – in real time. Recent research from The Economist Intelligence Unit lists this exact objective to be the #1 challenge reported by their research population. Elasticsearch makes tackling this challenge easy and doesn't require you to be a data scientist to put it to good use.

Our Team: Deep Technical and Open Source Business Experience
In the end our company is only going to be successful if the folks that are part of it are true professionals that know what they're doing, and have a laser-like focus on the success of anybody who uses Elasticsearch. This is what our team of former SpringSource veterans and technology specialist are doing every day.

When Shay and I joined forces about 6 months ago, we set out to build a company based on our shared belief that we would be able to create a beacon of light in our industry. Our industry, mostly referred to as the big data market, is undeniably complex and extraordinary technology heavy. Many companies provide a solution that solves one of the many technical challenges companies are facing when aiming to gain competitive advantage from the massive volumes of data it's gathering on a daily basis. I believe that up until Shay created Elasticsearch, very few – if any –of the solutions available were able to make achieving this objective as easy as operating an Apple device.

So in a way Elasticsearch already achieved its objective, which makes my life as the CEO of Elasticsearch a lot easier of course. However, we're not done. In fact, we're only getting started…

Since we launched the company, I have received many questions on where we want to take the company and what we plan on doing moving forward. The key element to the answer to that question has always been, that our way forward is merely a continuation of the path we're currently on. Please allow me to elaborate.

The more we talk to people who use Elasticsearch, the more we are able to distill 3 main reasons why Elasticsearch is so popular. In a nutshell, people love our product because it is:

Easy to use

Robust

Complete

To us, this is an extremely important finding. Predominantly because this confirms that Shay and his team are achieving their objective: to make an extremely easy to use product that reliably delivers on its promise. The mere fact that a product achieve it's objective is actually not as common as it might seem. As products mature, markets mature and as product's established user base grows, it's not uncommon for product roadmaps to deviate from its original path due to heavy pressure from many outside forces. I believe that Elasticsearch was created after a solid vision, rather than based on feature requests from individual users. This has had a massive positive impact on Shay's ability to create a product that is usable for an immensely large audience, instead of just a handful of power users. Shay has not given in to temptations, but rather worked closely together with many users to create a user-friendly product that meets all critical requirements in a large number of use cases.

The challenge for our company is to be as focused on being as easy to work with, robust and complete as our product is. Now that doesn't mean that there's nothing left to be desired. Au contraire, we are currently working hard on bullet proofing our support organization by scaling it out fast and fine-tuning our systems to ensure the quality of our support increases while our client base rapidly grows. We are also working on a public training course schedule that covers more cities across the globe, to ensure attendees never have to travel unacceptably far to attend a course. And as is to be expected, we are growing our executive team with talented professional that have the required skills to help grow our reach.

With Elasticsearch now having a company behind it to propel it forward, it seems safe to conclude that the Big Data Dark Ages are now finally behind us.